[CFF 2020 World Premiere Review] The Wanting Mare is a Lyrical Fantasy Unlike Any I've Seen

From Chattanooga Film Festival, open to residents of The United States. Virtual Festival Badges for this and all other festival films can be purchased here.

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“A Small Epic,” the press notes tell me. And, in a lot of ways, that feels like the best and only way to describe The Wanting Mare. It’s a story about dreams and history repeating. About longing and a desire to understand, both the world and our place in it. It’s a fantasy that doesn’t operate on traditional fantasy tropes. It’s unique. And sad. Hopeful. But depressing. Filled with concrete ideas and themes. But it’s also frustratingly ambiguous. Epic. But small.

In other words, reader: I don’t know how I’m supposed to review this. But join me as I try to figure my way through it. 

In the world of Anmaere lies the city of Whithren. We’re told that wild horses are the city’s most valuable export and so they hunt, trap, sell and ship them, once a year, across the sea to the continent of Levithen. While Withren is a world of eternal and unrelenting heat, Levithen is in a constant state of winter. Each year, when the horses are shipped off to Levithen, the ship will also take passengers who have tickets. Unfortunately, the tickets are not only an incredibly rare commodity but they are also highly coveted. 

Into this world we meet a dying woman cradling her newborn daughter as she bleeds out from the delivery. We follow the daughter as she grows into a 25 year old woman named Moira (Jordan Monaghan) who’s sole desire is to leave the stifling heat of Whithren for Levithen; the place where her lineage comes from.

It turns out that Moira’s lineage comes with a magical secret. Every night, she dreams of the world before and it’s terrible and it burns. She doesn’t sleep much, because of the dreams. Instead, she spends time in a dilapidated building that used to be a club where her mother would sing. Moira has decorated it with blue light bulbs and plays 8-tracks (or something similar) filled with the music her mom would presumably sing. Just like the dreams of the “World Before” that burn her every night, she tries to experience her dead mother’s life before she was born. She finds herself wanting. Wanting answers, yes. But also wanting her dreams to go away. 

So when she meets the wounded criminal Lawrence (writer/director Nicholas Ashe Bateman), she merely wants him to secure her a ticket across the sea. But what begins as an uneasy alliance turns into something more; a supercut of their relationship plays out, as dreamlike and disjointed as I’m sure the dreams plaguing Moira are. 

It’s here that the editing (also by writer/director/actor Nicholas Ashe Bateman) and the photography by David A. Ross and the love they put into this film comes into focus. So much of Moira and Lawrence’s relationship plays out in brief snippets. Scenes of them cuddled or sleeping together in various places and spaces. Melting into one another. Leaning on each other. Walking together through fields, their fingers playfully exploring each other’s hands. Dancing. Spinning. Laughing. It’s a lifetime in a brief, disjointed dream. Without knowing much about these two star-crossed lovers, the editing choices rely on our cinematic knowledge to create a relationship in shorthand. 

But then the narrative takes a risky, albeit thematically necessary, jump thirty four years into the future and focuses on another star-crossed pair of Eirah (Yasamin Keshtkar) and Hadeon (Edmond Cofie). Like Moira and Lawrence, their relationship comes at a moment of escape and wanting, with both members looking at the promised land of Levithen as their salvation. 

Through both narratives, we get a slight glimpse of the world of Anmaere but it’s obvious that this is only one of many potential stories set in the world. Anmaere refreshingly feels like a real and lived-in place that operates in the fantasy realm without relying on the tradition of the European Middle Ages as its inspiration. It feels painfully of the now, with its mess of buildings and sweltering heat and a certain kind of wistfulness. Nostalgia for a time before, when the world was wild and magical, haunts the inhabitants of Withren and paralyzes them as much as it burns Moira.

Because, before, there was “...a possibility to not be...like this.”

Lyrical and novel probably best describes The Wanting Mare, as it feels like the opening chapter of a sprawling novel (or series of novels). And in that ambiguity, the narrative will either win over fans or alienate them. It keeps the viewer distant, not only from the characters but also from the world. We get glimpses, but they’re as fleeting as a dream. It’s more interested in exploring a feeling of longing and…well, wanting…than it is in exploring traditional narrative tropes. It’s enigmatic, but purposeful. And the way the histories of the two pairs of couples both enforce and subvert a circuitous journey transcends a traditional plot structure.

The Wanting Mare taps into emotions and the ending actually made me cry as we find these characters, wanting for something they can never have. And in that, I guess, we’re all like the trapped and captured mares, waiting to be shipped off to an unknown future in Levithen.

Hoping for a brighter future while dreaming of a past when things weren’t fucked...an impossible dream.